Open Universities Offer Opportunities for Filipinos to Juggle Work, Academics
Image Caption: In Photo: Adela Bacud, a former overseas Filipino worker in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, does some home studying. According to her, it is never too late to learn as long as your heart is in it.
Part One
BETWEEN her reportorial assignments as national correspondent of ABS-CBN Corp.’s media subsidiary and her teaching schedule at the College of Mass Communication-University of the Philippines (UP) in Diliman, Apples Jalandoni could no longer spare the time to pursue her doctoral studies.
“I was midway through my PhD in Communication at the College of Mass Communication in UP when I reached a point where I needed to stop,” Jalandoni told the BusinessMirror. “I could no longer manage to attend the thrice-a-week classes at the Diliman campus.”
She said her schedule at work as a news reporter was just too unpredictable. She added it was also around this time, sometime in 2011, when she began her climate-change advocacy, “which entailed constant traveling for community work and conferences.”
The television reporter said she found it devastating to have to quit her advanced studies in communication.
Luckily, for Jalandoni, two UP officials pointed her to another path to gaining a doctorate degree.
Jalandoni said Grace Javier Alfonso, who was then-chancellor of UP Open University (UPOU), and National College of Public Administration and Governance (NCPAG) Dean Fe Mendoza encouraged her to continue her doctoral studies in communication at the UPOU. She enrolled in the UPOU in 2012. Now doing her dissertation, she hopes to finish her PhD in communication next year.
“It was one of the most important decisions I ever made in my entire adult life,” Jalandoni said. “Although it was not an easy one since, as [the] UPOU is a separate entity from the Diliman [campus], I had to begin the doctoral program all over again. But now that my hard work is culminating, I would say it was truly worth it.”
Distance education
IN her paper, “The openness of the [UPOU]: Issues and Prospects,” UPOU academician Maria Fe Villamejor-Mendoza presented a legal definition of an OU as “a higher-education institution [HEI] that is a separate, autonomous and degree-granting academic entity, which employs operational procedures and strategies of an open learning institution.”
It is distinguished from the “residential, traditional brick-and-mortar universities” in the sense that an OU provides educational opportunities beyond the physical boundaries of the conventional education system through distance education.
Villamejor-Mendoza cited the 2006 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) definition of distance education as “any educational process in which all or most of the teaching is conducted by someone geographically removed from the learner, with all or most of the communication between teachers and learners being conducted through electronic or print mediums.”
UP’s OU uses virtual classrooms, e-mail, SMS, teleconferencing and video-conferencing to provide education to learners in more than 60 locations around the world.
“Most of our students are working, even those who are enrolled in the undergraduate programs,” UPOU Chancellor Melinda de la Peña-Bandalaria said.
Bandalaria added that more than 90 percent of the enrollees “cannot really go or study in the conventional/residential program.”
Most of them, like Jalandoni, are studying for professional advancement. About 24 percent of UPOU students are based outside of the country, she added.
The OU experience, according to Jalandoni, gave her “the best of both worlds: achieving the highest academic level from the country’s top learning institution while still able to pursue a demanding, yet rewarding, career.”
“I believe that the open and distance learning system is the future of education, when knowledge is generated and shared, beyond the restrictions of time and space,” Jalandoni said. “This means we could study practically anytime, anywhere and at our own pace.”
She added that “this unprecedented enjoyment of freedom in learning also demands the most rigorous self-discipline and determination to not only harness one’s expertise, but, most especially, to promote nation-building for the benefit of all.”
In her paper, titled “Impact of ICTs on Open and Distance Learning in a Developing Country Setting: The Philippine Experience”, Bandalaria said, “because the Philippines is actually a country comprised of 7,107 islands, many Filipino learners cannot easily access universities main campuses and, in many instances, even their satellite campuses and learning centers.”
“Moreover, most potential students work full time and must juggle family responsibilities,” Bandalaria wrote.
Early beginnings
ACCORDING to Bandalaria, the earliest documented effort of open and distance learning (ODL), in the Philippines was the Farmers’ School-on-the-Air (FSA). The FSA first aired in 1952 via a 1-kiloWatt radio station in Iloilo province.
A program titled “Tips on Farming and Community Development”, which was broadcast in 1952 over a period of six months, served approximately 150 students scattered throughout the province, she added.
“The FSA format was adopted by other radio stations and government agencies who aimed to teach different segments of Filipino society lessons they deemed necessary to improve Filipinos’ standard of living,” Bandalaria explained. “A sustained use of radio for instruction in the schools-on-the-air [SOA] format was accomplished by [the] DZLB, a radio station managed by the UP Los Banos [UPLB] [campus], which itself was a constituent unit of the [UP].”
She added that the nonformal courses delivered through FSAs/SOAs was the forerunner of modern distance education in the Philippines.
As such, radio can be viewed as the first-generation distance education in the Philippines, according to Bandalaria.
“Recognizing the potential of DE [distance education] for continuing education of various professional groups, many traditional universities started offering their graduate degree programs via DE methods, which relied mostly on print-based instructional materials supplemented with occasional face-to-face tutorials facilitated by a university-trained tutor,” she wrote. “This is the second-generation DE. Lessons were typically contained in a set of print-based learning materials supplemented by face-to-face tutorials.” Bandalaria noted that the third generation of DE emerged from a growing need for flexible learning (anytime, anywhere). This was made possible by increased availability and access to new information and communications technology (ICT).
To address these emerging societal demands—geographically dispersed professional groups seeking access to flexible, lifelong learning opportunities—instructional contents were primarily delivered in print-based formats (where instructional design is essential), supplemented with lesson components typically delivered in convenient audio and/or video formats, Bandalaria explained.
She added that the fourth-generation DE, or the “empowered phase”, can be aptly described using terms like e-Learning (electronic learning), m-learning (mobile learning), and u-learning (ubiquitous learning).
“For teachers, the use of ICTs helped enhance their skills and knowledge. For students, use of ICTs enabled them to assert more control over their learning environment, specifically the ‘how,’ the ‘when’ and the ‘where’, and sometimes even the ‘what’ they will learn,” Bandalaria said. “Both students and teachers now have more flexibility to shape and structure their learning/ teaching environment to take full advantage of fellow participants’
prior experiences.”
She added that this dynamic of “sharing prior knowledge and skills and contextualizing within the course materials” makes the educational experience far richer and more conducive to critical and higher-order thinking.
RA 10650, schools
ON December 9, 2014, former President Benigno S. Aquino III signed Republic Act 10650, also known as the ODL law.
The act expanded access to and appropriated funds for educational services by institutionalizing ODL in levels of tertiary education.
It adopted open learning as an educational philosophy and the use of distance education in higher education, as well as technical education programs in the Philippines.
Bandalaria said that, to date, there are around 17 universities accredited to offer distance-education programs.
Accreditation is done by the CHEd initially based on CHEd Memorandum 27 in 2009 and, now, RA 10650, she said, adding that there is a CHEd technical panel processing the accreditation.
To be continued
(Source: BusinessMirror.com.ph)